Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

Newsweek.
Once again he invited his favorite reporters over to his Woodside home, and this 
time he did not have Andy Cunningham there urging him to be circumspect. He dismissed the 
allegation that he had improperly lured the five colleagues from Apple. “These people all called 
me,” he told the gaggle of journalists who were milling around in his unfurnished living room. 
“They were thinking of leaving the company. Apple has a way of neglecting people.”
He decided to cooperate with a 
Newsweek
cover in order to get his version of the story out, and 
the interview he gave was revealing. “What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people 
and making things with them,” he told the magazine. He said that he would always harbor 
affection for Apple. “I’ll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he’s 
fallen in love with.” But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. “When 
someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond.” Apple’s threat to sue him was 
outrageous. It was also sad. It showed that Apple was no longer a confident, rebellious company. 
“It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 employees couldn’t compete with six 
people in blue jeans.”
To try to counter Jobs’s spin, Sculley called Wozniak and urged him to speak out. “Steve can 
be an insulting and hurtful guy,” he told 
Time
that week. He revealed that Jobs had asked him to 
join his new firm—it would have been a sly way to land another blow against Apple’s current 
management—but he wanted no part of such games and had not returned Jobs’s phone call. To the 
San Francisco Chronicle
, he recounted how Jobs had blocked frogdesign from working on his 
remote control under the pretense that it might compete with Apple products. “I look forward to a 
great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust,” Wozniak said.
To Be on Your Own
“The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost,” Arthur Rock 
later said. The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love made him wiser and more mature. 
But it’s not that simple. At the company he founded after being ousted from Apple, Jobs was able 
to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a series of 
spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. 
This
was the true learning experience. What 
prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at 
Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II.
The first instinct that he indulged was his passion for design. The name he chose for his new 
company was rather straightforward: Next. In order to make it more distinctive, he decided he 
needed a world-class logo. So he courted the dean of corporate logos, Paul Rand. At seventy-one, 
the Brooklyn-born graphic designer had already created some of the best-known logos in business, 
including those of 
Esquire
, IBM, Westinghouse, ABC, and UPS. He was under contract to IBM, 

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and his supervisors there said that it would obviously be a conflict for him to create a logo for 
another computer company. So Jobs picked up the phone and called IBM’s CEO, John Akers. 
Akers was out of town, but Jobs was so persistent that he was finally put through to Vice 
Chairman Paul Rizzo. After two days, Rizzo concluded that it was futile to resist Jobs, and he 
gave permission for Rand to do the work.
Rand flew out to Palo Alto and spent time walking with Jobs and listening to his vision. The 
computer would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that shape. It was perfect and simple. So 
Rand decided that the logo should be a cube as well, one that was tilted at a 28° angle. When Jobs 
asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different 
options
for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I 
produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.”
Jobs admired that kind of thinking, so he made what was quite a gamble. The company would 
pay an astonishing $100,000 flat fee to get 
one
design. “There was a clarity in our relationship,” 
Jobs said. “He had a purity as an artist, but he was astute at solving business problems. He had a 
tough exterior, and had perfected the image of a curmudgeon, but he was a teddy bear inside.” It 
was one of Jobs’s highest praises: purity as an artist.
It took Rand just two weeks. He flew back to deliver the result to Jobs at his Woodside house. 
First they had dinner, then Rand handed him an elegant and vibrant booklet that described his 
thought process. On the final spread, Rand presented the logo he had chosen. “In its design, color 
arrangement, and orientation, the logo is a study in contrasts,” his booklet proclaimed. “Tipped at 
a jaunty angle, it brims with the informality, friendliness, and spontaneity of a Christmas seal and 
the authority of a rubber stamp.” The word “next” was split into two lines to fill the square face of 
the cube, with only the “e” in lowercase. That letter stood out, Rand’s booklet explained, to 
connote “education, excellence . . . e = mc
2
.”
It was often hard to predict how Jobs would react to a presentation. He could label it shitty or 
brilliant; one never knew which way he might go. But with a legendary designer such as Rand, the 
chances were that Jobs would embrace the proposal. He stared at the final spread, looked up at 
Rand, and then hugged him. They had one minor disagreement: Rand had used a dark yellow for 
the “e” in the logo, and Jobs wanted him to change it to a brighter and more traditional yellow. 
Rand banged his fist on the table and declared, “I’ve been doing this for fifty years, and I know 
what I’m doing.” Jobs relented.
The company had not only a new logo, but a new name. No longer was it Next. It was NeXT. 
Others might not have understood the need to obsess over a logo, much less pay $100,000 for one. 
But for Jobs it meant that NeXT was starting life with a world-class feel and identity, even if it 
hadn’t yet designed its first product. As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able 
to impute its values from the first impression it makes.
As a bonus, Rand agreed to design a personal calling card for Jobs. He came up with a colorful 
type treatment, which Jobs liked, but they ended up having a lengthy and heated disagreement 
about the placement of the period after the “P” in Steven P. Jobs. Rand had placed the period to 
the right of the “P.”, as it would appear if set in lead type. 
Steve preferred the period to be nudged to the left, under the curve of the “P.”, as is possible 
with digital typography. “It was a fairly large argument about something relatively small,” Susan 
Kare recalled. On this one Jobs prevailed.
In order to translate the NeXT logo into the look of real products, Jobs needed an industrial 
designer he trusted. He talked to a few possibilities, but none of them impressed him as much as 
the wild Bavarian he had imported to Apple: Hartmut Esslinger, whose frogdesign had set up shop 
in Silicon Valley and who, thanks to Jobs, had a lucrative contract with Apple. Getting IBM to 
permit Paul Rand to do work for NeXT was a small miracle willed into existence by Jobs’s belief 
that reality can be distorted. But that was a snap compared to the likelihood that he could convince 
Apple to permit Esslinger to work for NeXT.
This did not keep Jobs from trying. At the beginning of November 1985, just five weeks after 
Apple filed suit against him, Jobs wrote to Eisenstat and asked for a dispensation. “I spoke with 
Hartmut Esslinger this weekend and he suggested I write you a note expressing why I wish to 
work with him and frogdesign on the new products for NeXT,” he said. Astonishingly, Jobs’s 

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argument was that he did not know what Apple had in the works, but Esslinger did. “NeXT has no 
knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s product designs, nor do other design 
firms we might deal with, so it is possible to inadvertently design similar looking products. It is in 
both Apple’s and NeXT’s best interest to rely on Hartmut’s professionalism to make sure this does 
not occur.” Eisenstat recalled being flabbergasted by Jobs’s audacity, and he replied curtly. “I 
have previously expressed my concern on behalf of Apple that you are engaged in a business 
course which involves your utilization of Apple’s confidential business information,” he wrote. 
“Your letter does not alleviate my concern in any way. In fact it heightens my concern because it 
states that you have ‘no knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s product 
designs,’ a statement which is not true.” What made the request all the more astonishing to 
Eisenstat was that it was Jobs who, just a year earlier, had forced frogdesign to abandon its work 
on Wozniak’s remote control device.
Jobs realized that in order to work with Esslinger (and for a variety of other reasons), it would 
be necessary to resolve the lawsuit that 
Apple had filed. Fortunately Sculley was willing. In January 1986 they reached an out-of-court 
agreement involving no financial damages. In return for Apple’s dropping its suit, NeXT agreed to 
a variety of restrictions: Its product would be marketed as a high-end workstation, it would be sold 
directly to colleges and universities, and it would not ship before March 1987. Apple also insisted 
that the NeXT machine “not use an operating system compatible with the Macintosh,” though it 
could be argued that Apple would have been better served by insisting on just the opposite.
After the settlement Jobs continued to court Esslinger until the designer decided to wind down 
his contract with Apple. That allowed frogdesign to work with NeXT at the end of 1986. Esslinger 
insisted on having free rein, just as Paul Rand had. “Sometimes you have to use a big stick with 
Steve,” he said. Like Rand, Esslinger was an artist, so Jobs was willing to grant him indulgences 
he denied other mortals.
Jobs decreed that the computer should be an absolutely perfect cube, with each side exactly a 
foot long and every angle precisely 90 degrees. He liked cubes. They had gravitas but also the 
slight whiff of a toy. But the NeXT cube was a Jobsian example of design desires trumping 
engineering considerations. The circuit boards, which fitted nicely into the traditional pizza-box 
shape, had to be reconfigured and stacked in order to nestle into a cube.
Even worse, the perfection of the cube made it hard to manufacture. Most parts that are cast in 
molds have angles that are slightly greater than pure 90 degrees, so that it’s easier to get them out 
of the mold (just as it is easier to get a cake out of a pan that has angles slightly greater than 90 
degrees). But Esslinger dictated, and Jobs enthusiastically agreed, that there would be no such 
“draft angles” that would ruin the purity and perfection of the cube. So the sides had to be 
produced separately, using molds that cost $650,000, at a specialty machine shop in Chicago. 
Jobs’s passion for perfection was out of control. When he noticed a tiny line in the chassis caused 
by the molds, something that any other computer maker would accept as unavoidable, he flew to 
Chicago and convinced the die caster to start over and do it perfectly. “Not a lot of die casters 
expect a celebrity to fly in,” noted one of the engineers. Jobs also had the company buy a 
$150,000 
sanding machine to remove all lines where the mold faces met and insisted that the magnesium 
case be a matte black, which made it more susceptible to showing blemishes.
Jobs had always indulged his obsession that the unseen parts of a product should be crafted as 
beautifully as its façade, just as his father had taught him when they were building a fence. This 
too he took to extremes when he found himself unfettered at NeXT. He made sure that the screws 
inside the machine had expensive plating. He even insisted that the matte black finish be coated 
onto the inside of the cube’s case, even though only repairmen would see it.
Joe Nocera, then writing for 
Esquire
, captured Jobs’s intensity at a NeXT staff meeting:
It’s not quite right to say that he is sitting through this staff meeting, because Jobs doesn’t sit through 
much of anything; one of the ways he dominates is through sheer movement. One moment he’s kneeling 
in his chair; the next minute he’s slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is 
scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him. He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares 

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with unnerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably 
yellow, are in constant motion.
What particularly struck Nocera was Jobs’s “almost willful lack of tact.” It was more than just an 
inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a conscious 
readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter. 
When Dan’l Lewin handed out an organization chart, for example, Jobs rolled his eyes. “These 
charts are bullshit,” he interjected. Yet his moods still swung wildly, as at Apple. A finance person 
came into the meeting and Jobs lavished praise on him for a “really, really great job on this”; the 
previous day Jobs had told him, “This deal is crap.”
One of NeXT’s first ten employees was an interior designer for the company’s first 
headquarters, in Palo Alto. Even though Jobs had leased a building that was new and nicely 
designed, he had it completely gutted and rebuilt. Walls were replaced by glass, the carpets were 
replaced by light hardwood flooring. The process was repeated 
when NeXT moved to a bigger space in Redwood City in 1989. Even though the building was 
brand-new, Jobs insisted that the elevators be moved so that the entrance lobby would be more 
dramatic. As a centerpiece, Jobs commissioned I. M. Pei to design a grand staircase that seemed to 
float in the air. The contractor said it couldn’t be built. Jobs said it could, and it was. Years later 
Jobs would make such staircases a feature at Apple’s signature stores.